In this post, Professor Toby Greany outlines the sixth (and final!) UK-wide theme in the Sustainable School Leadership research report:
6. One-size policy does not fit all – a need for local solutions
Educational leadership does not occur in a vacuum. Place pervades all our findings, showing how leaders work within specific contexts which shape fundamentally what leadership is, who becomes a leader, how leadership is practiced, & crucially, whether leadership can be sustained.
Place here is multi-dimensional, including but going beyond geography. The geographic, economic, historical, & social dimensions of place do not operate independently but interact in complex ways. Urban concentration in poor communities creates different leadership challenges than rural poverty; historical conflicts intersect with contemporary economic circumstances; organisational structures either leverage or work against geographic proximity, and so on.
Yet policy discussions commonly view place as little more than a backdrop upon which leadership is performed. While policymakers might categorise schools in broad terms based on geographic and socio-economic features (eg urban vs rural, above or below average levels of deprivation), our evidence shows that even two small rural schools in the same locality might require quite different forms of leadership.
Recognising the importance of place is not the same as saying that shared frameworks, structures & policies cannot be helpful – they can. In Northern Ireland, where school inspections were not occurring due to ASOS and the PQH programme was paused, leaders told us that they missed these national frameworks. But Northern Ireland also illustrates the downside of assuming that bigger is always better: the decision to close the Regional Education and Library Boards, in 2015, and to replace these with a single EA was widely seen to have been detrimental, leading to a loss of relational, place-based support.
The challenge of balancing agency, autonomy & prescription was equally apparent within local governance arrangements, such as LAs in Scotland and MATs in England. On the one hand we heard how shared frameworks could be helpful: for example, Scotland City LA’s focus on nurture had helped to build expertise and commitment across all schools. But these local governance bodies could also constrain place-based adaptation where they sought to apply a one-size-fits-all approach.
Sustainable School Leadership 